Channels, Fall 2016

Page 154 Parson • Drawing Is Where the Joy Is ball and chain, but they all quickly recover their dignity. The scene cuts to a completely gray, rocky space with a single sparkling, rainbow flower in the background. A sand- colored monster shaped like a baby with a giant head and prominent penis bursts from the ground and simply stands, blinking in the scene. His arrival apparently prompts the posing warriors to launch themselves into the air where they become blurs of color against a black sky, emphasized by the audience’s improvised battle-cry of “Super Big!” ( The Taste of Tea ). However, when they finally arrive to do battle with the docile burrowing baby, they turn out to be quite small, simply crashing into the side of the monster’s head where he smashes them with the palm of his hand. To make the bizarre scene even weirder, an elaborately dressed and completely incongruous and garishly sparkly blonde girl calmly walks into the barren landscape, tickles the monster right below the smeared remains of the heroes, and giggles. Reading this scene from the perspective of monster theory reveals an intriguing view of contemporary Japan. There are clear signs of the ambivalence and uncertainty that Ivy and Napier lead one to expect, but Yoshiko adds playful inversions that alter or subvert the predictable narrative. The animation consists almost exclusively of the monstrous fantastic, with the protagonists and antagonists both displaying elements of the monstrous. Members of the hero team are rendered as grotesque, inhuman, and unstable characters that seem to inhabit an ambiguous moral space. Their poses wildly distort the size of their limbs, and their expressions convey unhappy and uncontrolled expressions. One stretches his mouth to the size of his head and squints while exaggerated blue streams apparently representing tears stream down the face of another. The animation style exaggerates the characteristic slight shake of hand-drawn anime by rendering the heroes in loose scribbles so that the solid parts of the heroes seem to flow and writhe. The baby-monster, on the other hand, barely moves. His entire body is the color of the sand and rocks around him, and his eyes are tiny brown dots below several layers of wrinkles that denote eyebrows. Significantly, burrowing seems to be his only crime, at least until he crushes the hero team. Initially, this seems like depressing retelling of the postmodern cultural narrative: the dynamic forces of interconnectedness and courage within Japanese culture, symbolized by the hero team, prove to be both too small and fragile to do battle with the problems in contemporary global society and too hybrid and distorted to provide a clear alternative. Meanwhile, the monster to be fought blends into the color of the background to symbolize the way in which contemporary Japanese culture has come to reflect the values of global commercial culture. His minimal motion may express the sense of inertia or stagnation felt in Japanese society, while his exaggerated nudity may reflect the crudeness of Westernized or commercialized cultural values. While this reading is convincing at first glance, Yoshiko includes several unexpected twists that turn the expected narrative inside out. Most significantly, Yoshiko’s version of the story is funny. Rather than signaling the darkest point of the film, the sudden destruction of the hero team prompts laughter and excited exclamations like “What? They’re tiny! And flat!” from the audience in the studio. ( The Taste of Tea ). Perhaps this response stems from the perfect comic timing of the scene, but more likely it arises out of the absurdity of the fictional situation as a whole: rather than the destruction of something great, venerable, or